ZEN – no, not the meditation practice!

mishra

Rising Star
I wanted to start some discussion about the upcoming architecture from AMD called ZEN.

First of all, can any brand fanboys keep their attitude at bay as I know there is nothing worse than starting Intel vs AMD debate. Point of the thread is to have a constructive discussion, I hope.

Let me present my take on this...
Intel, undeniably has been at the top of CPU performance for few years now. Historically this has not been always the case, AMD had a great share in the CPU market and was revolutionizing the industry in the past with some really strong CPUs. As we know today, this is not quite like that and AMD is on a bit of a backburner.

For us, customers, market need a competition. Due to most recent hype-fail of Bulldozer architecture, Intel has been allowed to reign free and that is very bad! Thought the Intel CPUs are good, they prices are shockingly bad!
Additionally, difference in performance between Haswell, Broadwell and now Skylake is not that great really. While price/performance ratio can be justified when upgrading from Sandy/Ivy Bridge to Skylake, not the same can be said about upgrade path from Haswell to Skylake. You see, I was always under impression as soon as new architecture is released prices of the previous ones should go down. Well that is not the case and that is my main problem with Intel. They need a competition so we can finally enjoy some lower prices!

Now, towards the end of this year AMD ZEN architecture is supposed to come out, which get a lot of people excited (again!). Truth is AMD need to make this CPU to work, if they don't we will have another few years of Intel skyrocketing their prices, and potential future of AMD on the line?

So that is what we are promised...
AMD-Zen-01.pngAMD-Zen-02.png

In the past, it seems AMD focused too much on making number of cores and what not rather than providing a decent CPU with single core performance (yes I am looking at us gamers). Now with ZEN apparently this is supposed to change. AMD is promising ~40% IPC increase over Excavator core... well that is a good news, right? That would put ZEN somewhere between Haswell and Broadwell architecture as a starting point. It will also support DDR4, will come with brand new AM4 socket and is based on 14 nanometer technology... Additionally, no prices are available as of now but AMD was always very good on pricing (mostly). So we can expect prices to be very competitive or at least we will get twice as many cores in the worst case scenario in comparison to Intel offering.

On paper what could go wrong? Exactly, I know there is a lot of if's and but's at this moment and until we get some real world facts and benchmarks this is all in just theory crafting heaven. However, recently there has been some leaked results and these look very promising indeed. They do show (again multi-cores favor) but this necessarily is not a bad thing assuming single core performance is still on par (thanks to that IPC increase).

One could say, all great mate, but let's wait and see what real world will show... and I totally agree. Reason I make this post is to get some opinions of other computer enthusiasts, like you!
Also, my rig is up for some refresh and as I was looking at Skylake upgrade... prices are horrendous! I will be watching closely how will ZEN come into play... and for that reason I want AMD to succeed in great style. I want more pressure to be put on Intel... simply I want amazing Intel CPUs offering to be just cheaper. If Zen will fail... well it will cost us all this way or another.

ps. Sorry for wall of text, I hope it didn't critically hit you in the face :punk:
 

mishra

Rising Star
Crikey, if I knew my post will cause such a heated debate I would think twice about posting it in first place :p
I shall now go, put collar of shame and cry in some dark, abandoned place.

On a serious note, maybe it is a bit too early to discuss this... let's wait few more months will see how it will pan out.
 
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